Publish-and-Flourish: decentralized co-creation and curation of scholarly content

TL;DR

This paper introduces a blockchain-based platform for decentralized scholarly communication that encourages cooperation through community-driven review processes and modifiable research papers as smart contracts.

Contribution

It presents a novel blockchain platform enabling continuous peer review and modifiable research papers to foster cooperation in scholarly publishing.

Findings

Implemented a smart contract for modifiable research papers

Designed incentives promoting cooperative behavior

Facilitated continuous peer review process

Abstract

Scholarly communication is today immersed in publish or perish culture that propels noncooperative behaviour in the sense of strategic games played by researchers. Here we introduce and describe a blockchain based platform for decentralized scholarly communication. The design of the platform rests on community driven publishing reviewing processes and implements incentives that promote cooperative user behaviour. Key to achieve cooperation in blockchain based scholarly communication is to transform a static research paper into a modifiable research paper under continuous peer review process. We describe and discuss the implementation of a modifiable research paper as a smart contract on the blockchain.